The trial of the man charged with attempting to murder the novelist Salman Rushdie at a New York lecture is due to begin on Tuesday with jury selection, Reuters has reported.
Hadi Matar, 26, has pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree attempted murder and second-degree assault. Rushdie, who has faced death threats since the 1988 publication of his novel The Satanic Verses, is due to be among the first witnesses to testify at the trial.
Matar can be seen in mobile phone videos rushing the stage at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York in August 2022, as Rushdie was being introduced to the audience. The novelist, 77, was stabbed with a knife multiple times in an attack that led to the loss of his right eye and damaged his liver.
Rushdie has published a memoir about the attack, and said in interviews that he believed that he was going to die on the Chautauqua Institution’s stage.
The writer was raised in a Muslim Kashmiri family, and went into hiding under the protection of British police in 1989 after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, pronounced The Satanic Verses to be blasphemous. Khomeini’s fatwa, or religious edict, called upon Muslims to kill the novelist and anyone involved in the book’s publication, leading to a multi-million-dollar bounty.
The Iranian government said in 1998 that it would no longer back the fatwa, and Rushdie ended his years as a recluse, becoming a fixture of literary parties in New York City, where he lives.
After the attack, Matar told the New York Post that he travelled from his home in New Jersey after seeing the Rushdie event advertised because he disliked the novelist, saying that Rushdie had attacked Islam. Matar, a dual citizen of his native US and Lebanon, said in the interview that he was surprised that Rushdie survived, the Post reported.
The trial has been delayed twice, most recently after Matar’s defence lawyer tried unsuccessfully to move it to a different venue, saying that his client could not get a fair trial in Chautauqua. The trial is being held at the Chautauqua County Court in Mayville, a town of about 1,500 people near the Canadian border. If convicted of attempted murder, Matar faces a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison.
Matar is also facing federal charges in which prosecutors in the US attorney’s office in western New York accuse him of attempting to murder Rushdie as an act of terrorism and of providing material support to the armed group Hezbollah in Lebanon, which the US has designated as a terrorist organisation.
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